Socotra — an island off Yemen — has an eerily beautiful, otherworldly feel and is luring adventurous travelers.
By Haley Sweetland Edwards
Special to The Seattle Times
So there I was, lying on my back in a bikini on a deserted white-sand beach in Yemen, squinting into the shimmering turquoise sea to the west, wondering if I could make out Somalia from here.
I couldn't. Propped on my sandy elbows, all I could see were my own toes, a tract of impossibly fine white sand, and miles and miles of the Arabian Sea, which faded ever so slowly through a spectrum of teals before settling into a deep sapphire blue before, I couldn't help thinking, bumping up against Somalia, 160 miles away.
The whole situation was a little surreal. Given my geographic location — Socotra, a sparsely populated Yemeni island in the pirate-infested waters of the Gulf of Aden, a boat ride away from one of the bloodiest failed states on Earth in one direction, and a war-torn, impoverished one in the other — I knew I had no business being in a flowery green bikini. But somehow at the time it all made sense.
Perhaps that's because Socotra — the largest island in an eponymous, four-island archipelago off the southeast tip of Yemen — doesn't feel like either Yemen or Somalia. It doesn't really feel like anywhere on Earth.
The whole place has an eerily beautiful, otherworldly feel, beginning with its pocked and looming limestone cliffs, which drop into five-story-tall, white sand dunes, bisected at their bases by veins of grass tracing freshwater springs. Even the otherwise arid mountainsides and red sandstone plateaus look as if they were dreamed up by Dr. Seuss, thanks to the umbrella-shaped Dragon's Blood trees — so-named because of their red, medicinal sap — that grow nowhere else in the world. My favorite is the Socotran desert rose, a beige rutabaga-shaped tree.
more:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/travel/2011667410_tryemenisland25.html
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
